brainstorming for ideal music streaming setup: server+player+remote

I'm pretty happy with Subsonic, I can have my music server hidden away in my basement, and listen to music while driving using my phone, or on my laptop using the nice minisub web interface, or I can jack my phone or laptop into my analogue living room stereo.

However, what I would ideally have, but haven't been able to do so far, is to have one player device permanently hooked up to my stereo in the living room, playing music stored on the server hidden away in the basement, and remote controlled using my phone/laptop. Subsonic has this "jukebox" feature, but unfortunately, it assumes the server and the player is one and the same device.

I've looked at ampache, but was scared away by the web interface (though viridian made it bearable). I realise this is quite subjective, it just does not feel near as usable to me as Subsonic.

I've also used mpd a bit (ncmpcpp is by far the best music player interface I've ever used, though I'm loath to inflict the command line on other family members), but I'm not sure how I would make it do what I want – perhaps run mpd on the player, with music over NFS/sshfs? I guess I'd have to make a new user on the server that only had access to music folders then, and still keep subsonic running for when I'm driving.

Or would it be better/simpler to use subsonic's jukebox feature and stream using, say, pulseaudio over the network to another machine? Can I then use, say, an android phone as the player (haven't seen any pulseaudio "app" yet …), or would it be easier to hook a Raspberry Pi up to my stereo?

I am trying to do the same thing. My headless server is running subsonic in one room and plays just fine via alsa and attached stereo. How do I make subsonic play via pulseaudio on a headless system in the first place? I read the Java Wiki article, but only java 6/pulseaudio is mentioned. I have jre7-openjdk, pulseaudio and subsonic installed, but subsonic only plays via alsa. if i start pulseaudio and then subsonic, it still plays via alsa.

Next step I also would like to let a raspberrypi stream that to another room via rtp/pulseaudio.

naaa, I would prefer subsonic. There is a nice app, my girlfriend is used to it. And she is not a nerd at all and doesn't want to bothered with too user-unfriendly stuff. And I am all with her on that one.

Grabbing all audio would have the advantage not to be stuck with mpd or subsonic or xbmc or whatever. I also tried ices2 and icecast. It worked, but quality was horrible. I played around with settings for an hour, but gave up.

... why the heck would you use icecast when MPD has a perfectly usable built-in httpd?

Anything that actually has a legit pulseaudio output (including mpd) should be able to connect to any arbitrary pulse server, either via configuration of the output itself or via setting the PULSE_SERVER environment variable. There is a quick guide on the Wiki on how to do that with MPD and IP address ACLs; I imagine Subsonic would have a similar method.

ncmpcpp and MPDroid seem pretty user friendly to me; Subsonic does have an advantage in that their mobile apps automatically cache audio data like Google Play Music, allowing you to relisten without a data connection.

ncmpcpp and MPDroid seem pretty user friendly to me; Subsonic does have an advantage in that their mobile apps automatically cache audio data like Google Play Music, allowing you to relisten without a data connection.

And their mobile apps allow you to play … MPDroid is just a remote, no? But perhaps there are Android apps that allow you to play the PulseAudio RTP stream? (I never got the regular http stream to work well with mpd, Firefox will play one song and then stop, and I have to reload the page.)

I really don't understand this last option. I chose the local IP address of the server, but it's not like I could set it to another computer's IP address right?

Anyway, I can control the MPD server, with MPDroid, I can select and play songs, pause them, etc. However, I get no audio from the phone. In MPDROID, I've enabled "My http stream", and in the options I've enabled "Streaming", "single mode", and "consume" in different combinations, but no sound (I can't find any documentation on these modes, so I have no idea what they do, "streaming" seams redundant). I don't know if the problem is with the server or the client.

Last edited by Convergence (2013-07-24 21:22:08)

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